ISDN comes under fire for sluggish performance

NEWS A senior IT director has complained to Silicon.com that ISDN is failing to meet the growing needs of the print and design industry. Reprographic houses rely heavily on ISDN to transfer images and data. But Alistair Deacon, technical director for Ripping Image, says the technology cannot cope with the level of demand or bandwidth requirements. "The size of files are often too large to send by ISDN and because more people are using it now the lines are often too busy. A lot of the time we just end up biking the files on floppy disk back and forth between us and the advertising company or newspaper," he said. Deacon added: "This is far less cost and time efficient, but when you are dealing with a £20,000 advert that has to be printed that night you can't afford to rely on ISDN." Andy Day, design director for Castle printers agreed. "We use ISDN particularly when we are off site. Although the size of the files we send are not massive it takes a long time to be received and it can sometimes be difficult to get through." Deacon believes a radically new system should be put in place but is unconvinced that ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line) is the answer. "Most people want something beyond ISDN - it will never be the pure digital network that everyone needs." He argued that, as with the guaranteed delivery networks such as those offered by Wamnet and Vio, its success would depend on the ability of the small companies to adopt it. "Take-up of ISDN was initially slow because of high prices, then they came down and it became more popular. The take-up of Wamnet was also slow. The same would be true for ADSL." Deacon concluded: "What we really need is for more direction from the telcos rather than the computer companies. Something that is more scaleable and more open."